


Kafka

by garyindistress



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-25
Updated: 2013-01-25
Packaged: 2017-11-26 19:55:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/653856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/garyindistress/pseuds/garyindistress
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chanyeol is a changed man.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kafka

It is a beautiful morning, Chanyeol decides right before opening his eyes to the harsh light. In a few moments he will go for a stretch and find that he cannot move his arms. In a panic, he’ll try to jump out of bed, only to realize he has no control over his legs either, and that this isn’t his bed. His bed is soft, fluffy, nothing like this cold hard metal surface. He will look down in a panic and in the process almost break off his head trying. The truth is, he has no neck. He does, however, have a pair of beady black eyeballs capable of 360 degree rotation in their tiny moist sockets. Forcing his eyeballs into motion, he notices three buttons in a line down the middle of his chest. They look like giant M&Ms, and this is his bare chest. In fact everything is bare. He is not wearing any clothes and, he realizes with terror, he has lost his penis.

His skin is a strange orange-brown texture. He has not been to a tanning salon in ages.

“I’m going to eat you,” says a familiar voice from above.

It is Baekhyun. Words cannot express the wave of relief that comes over Chanyeol, like the promise of a blue horizon to a man lost in the desert. Chanyeol can smell Baekhyun as he never could before—of comfort, familiarity, something he recognizes.

“You look delicious,” Baekhyun continues, and his head has been magnified a thousand times. 

Chanyeol shrieks.

Baekhyun shrieks back. “You can talk!” His eyes are rounder, larger than Chanyeol’s ever seen them, and Chanyeol has seen them an exhausting number of times, awake and in his dreams.

“It’s me,” Chanyeol says desperately. “Chanyeol.”

And Baekhyun stops screaming. He pokes at Chanyeol, on his forehead. “Chanyeol?” he asks, peering closely.

“Yes,” Chanyeol says eagerly.

Baekhyun looks horrified. “But you are a gingerbread man.” 

 

 

Baekhyun doesn’t eat him. 

“I want to, but I won’t. I can’t eat my best friend. I’m not that heartless,” he says, and it is a touching soliloquy. 

“My toe is itchy,” Chanyeol complains. Baekhyun tells him he doesn’t have toes anymore; it is phantom limb syndrome. Chanyeol wants to cry and he does, leaving tear tracks that smell of brown sugar and soften the bread in his cheeks.

Baekhyun moves him to his room. He hides him behind the laptop so the others won’t see. Jongin will wonder where the last gingerbread man went and he will accuse Joonmyun first. The accusation will sound like a joke but also like a veiled personal attack, and Joonmyun will worry himself with it for days. 

“These are the sacrifices I make for you,” says Baekhyun. “Our band will begin to crumble, starting with Joonmyun’s insecurities.”

“Is that what you’re concerned with?” Chanyeol huffs. “When I go to sleep at night praying my head is still intact the next morning.”

Chanyeol’s head is fine the next morning. It’s his left leg that’s gone.

 

 

“I was hungry,” is Baekhyun’s apology. He has been crying, but tears will not bring Chanyeol’s leg back to life. Tears will not make Baekhyun regurgitate it in its whole consummate glory. 

“I have nothing to say to you,” Chanyeol tells him. “You are dead to me.”

“But I’m all you have now,” Baekhyun says.

 

 

When Chanyeol dreams, it is of movement. Of being useful. Of going from one place to another, doing things for people he cares about. 

He wakes up stupid and immobile. His other leg has disappeared in the night.

One by one they go, until all that is left of him is a head.

 

 

“I’m sorry,” Baekhyun says over and over again, and Chanyeol believes him. He isn’t mad anymore. He can’t remember exactly how anger feels.

Most of him is now in Baekhyun, or has passed through Baekhyun. At one point in his life, his previous human life, this would have filled him with a bashful pride, the kind that seeks to burst out of your heart and makes you shout embarrassing confessions of love out your window.

“I just wanted to be close to you. Seeing you like this hurts me the most,” Baekhyun says, his lips a quivering few inches away from Chanyeol. Inches feel like forever when you’re a gingerbread man.

“I know,” Chanyeol says. He adds, “Me too,” before slipping into the dark abyss of Baekhyun’s mouth.

**Author's Note:**

> Written 1/8/13 for Joie.


End file.
